Harold comments on the assault by politicians on the video game industry.

Well, I had no difficulty in thinking up a topic to write about for this update. Having played video games since the age of 3, the industry remains near and dear to my heart. Thus, it seemed only right to discuss the Democrats’ assault on free speech through their years of trying to censor the video game industry.

The War on the Video Game Industry

The Democrats have steadily lost credibility when it comes to the notion of protecting the First Amendment. It started with Senator Joe Lieberman spearheading the campaign for video game censorship, citing games like Grand Theft Auto (although the only footage ever shown during these speeches comes from the Grand Theft Auto series) as the reason we need to ban violent video games. Recently, Representative Joe Baca and Senator Hillary Clinton have spoken out against violence in video games as well. Under the guise of protecting children and making parenting easier, Baca proposed a bill to impose penalties on retailers who provide minors with access to games featuring violent crimes or killing of human beings. In reality, the bill would stymie free speech and make it more difficult for consenting adults to access material readily available in mediums such as movies and television.

Problems with censorship

The proposed legislation would impose penalties for the sale of a game that depicts “the killing of human beings by the use of an object as a lethal weapon or hand to hand fighting.” By this definition, any strategic historical war simulation would fall under the scope of this bill. You want to market a game to teach children about the Civil War? Would that game have the same effectiveness if you could not depict armies falling in battle? How about the conquests of Genghis Khan or the Roman Empire? The bill makes no mention of the depiction of blood and has absolutely no human interaction to determine whether a reasonable person would find the game suitable for children.

The bill also covers games that feature “decapitation, amputation, dismemberment, or mutilation.” I believe I’ve seen at least one of those on an episode of The Simpsons, but again, the bill offers little in the way of distinction.

Hypocrisy in implementation

Children have plenty of access in other forms of media to the type of materials the Democrats seek to prohibit. Notwithstanding a child’s propensity to bypass child-safe locks (censorship controls on a computer or tv, “child-proof” containers), children can still buy DVDs and music or watch television programs not intended for children according to the results of an FTC survey. Moreover, between video game companies instructing merchants not to sell such games to minors (and merchants honoring those requests) and the clear “M” rating on the packaging and advertisements of such titles, parents have as much information to make an informed purchase as they do in deciding what movie to take their child to see. From ESRB.org: “Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older.” This description looks quite similar to the “R” rating for movies, which have the same age restriction.

If the Democrats want to speak out about violence in video games, why don’t they also speak out about violence in movies and television? After all, movies and television shows feature much more lifelike effects and actual people committing realistic violent acts. But we don’t see Clinton and her fellow Democrats speaking out about people in shows like Alias cutting people’s fingers off on primetime television. Never mind children–adults can’t opt out of receiving such television broadcasts without opting out of television altogether or without blocking out acceptable programs or even acceptable episodes of the same program. In contrast, you never have to buy any particular video game. Likewise, Baca’s proposed legislation only targets video games, not movies and television. Surely, the fact that Hollywood’s elite speaks out in favor of the Democrats during political campaigns has nothing to do with the blind eye they turn towards movie and television violence.

Defeat the agenda, advance to the next level

Do not let this assault on the video game industry fool you. While I cannot say for certain what propels this agenda of the Democrats, I can say that bills like this are ill-conceived and misguided. Too much acceptable content gets censored by such bills. Furthermore, bills like this try to scapegoat a particular segment of the industry over something for which the entire industry (and consumer parents) should be responsible. The worst part of this recent controversy might lie in the fact that one can only access the controversial sex scenes found in the latest PC version of Grand Theft Auto through a third-party modification, or “mod”, not provided by the video game company itself. If the purpose of the bill truly only involved protecting children, the authors of the bill would not have limited it to video games, but would have extended it to include violent movies and music with explicit cop-killing lyrics.

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